Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance heads north with Evolution

Slitherine released Evolution, the next major story expansion for Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance, on 22 September. The add-on costs £10.75 on Steam, or $11.99, and continues the real-time strategy game's war against Legion rather than resetting it.

What the new campaign covers

Evolution sends Lieutenant Church and the Resistance north into the frozen territories of Canada in search of new allies and new hope. The eight new campaign missions are built around Legion's mining operations and experimental research sites, which is where the expansion's story turns: something new is being assembled in the cold, and the Resistance arrives in time to find it half-finished.

That something is a fresh generation of Revs, engineered for speed and close-quarters fighting, with bladed limbs rather than rifles. Slitherine describes the change as a brutal shift in battlefield tactics, because a machine that closes the distance turns an RTS firefight into a melee it has trained for. Augmented human soldiers can meet them hand to hand.

The Integrators and the new units

Humanity is changing too. The Integrators believe hybrid augmentation lets people transcend their limits, and their discovery of Legion's experimental technology sparks an uneasy alliance with Church's forces, along with a struggle over who controls what comes out of it. You command both Resistance and Integrator units across sabotage operations, defensive sieges and full-scale assaults.

New hardware arrives with them: the Leopard C2 MEXAS, the LAV-AT, the Legion Mini-Rover and the Integrator Plasma Multi-Barrel Mortar. The story picks up Church, Silas and 1462 from We Are Legion, the previous expansion, so Evolution is a continuation rather than a side story.

Slitherine has paired the launch with a discount: the base game is 40 per cent off and the earlier expansions are up to 25 per cent off. The base game arrived in February 2024 and casts the player as a commander in the Founders, the remnants of the US military, in a real-time strategy take on the Dark Fate future. Skirmish and multiplayer support the Founders, the Movement and Legion as playable factions.

Our opinion

Expansion packs for a 2024 strategy game usually add more of the same map with a bigger gun at the end, so the interesting decision in Evolution is the one that removes the comfort of range. Legion's blade-armed Revs force players who have spent two years trading fire at distance to hold a line at contact distance, which is a real change to how a scenario is read rather than a stat bump with a cutscene attached. The Integrator alliance is the part worth watching. Handing players augmented human units at the same time as the faction's motives are called into question is the kind of friction a licensed universe usually avoids, and if the eight missions actually make you choose between the two command styles, this will be the expansion that earns its £10.75. If not, it is another competent chapter in a war that already has plenty of them.